Review: It Could Happen To You (Stanley Long, 1975)

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“Groupie Girl” actor rocks on

Here is the Youtube site of actor/musician Emmett Hennessey, who was one of the fictional “Orange Butterfly” band in the Derek Ford/Stanley Long film Groupie Girl back in 1969, he now lives in Trinidad and is still performing, acting as an MC and opening act for major stars, which is where these recent performances come from.

http://www.youtube.com/user/ggkenny

As well as Groupie Girl, Emmett was also in tons of British films and TV programmes throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, appearing in everything from Doctor Who and Cathy Come Home to Primitive London and even a few of Harrison Marks’ 8mm films. One of his earliest roles was in London in the Raw (1964), in a faked sequence showing down on their luck beatniks eating cat food, don’t be fooled though, he reassures me that the cat food in question was just cans of tuna that Stanley Long and Arnold Louis Miller stuck cat food labels on. Emmett is a super nice guy, and I’m sure the only person to have worked with both Harrison Marks and Michael Bolton !!!!

Harrison Marks threesome: 1960 clipping

Three Harrison Marks related posts, kicking off with: A newspaper clipping from the Empire News and Sunday Chronicle (January 17th 1960) , I have it on good authority that Marks and Pamela Green were never actually married, but for reasons unknown pretended to be husband and wife throughout their relationship.

(For this site’s main Harrison Marks article: click here)

Harrison Marks threesome: 1978 advert

Lastly here is an advert from a David Sullivan magazine circa 1978, for several big bust 8mm films Marks must have sold onto Sullivan, the actress referred to as “Vivetta” in the films' synopsis is better known as Clyda Rosen.

For this site’s main Harrison Marks article: click here

Fiona Richmond soundtrack CD

Vocalion, a company that specialises in historic recordings re-issued on CD, has recently released a Fiona Richmond CD consisting of the entire score to the 1977 Richmond film ‘Hardcore’, plus selected music from the two other Richmond vehicles ‘Expose’ (1975) and ‘Lets Get Laid!’ (1977). The CD contains 34 tracks in all, 6 from Expose, 3 from Lets Get Laid and 25 from Hardcore (3 of which never made the finished film).

A selection that would no doubt find favour with Miss R herself, who once claimed to Cinema Blue magazine that Hardcore was her favourite of her films on account that it featured “no rubber glove murders, blood and gore” and that “I am the star”.

Anonymously financed by Richmond’s ‘enabler’ Paul Raymond, the Richmond films were for that reason the more lavish and stylish examples of their genre, and the soundtracks are similarly classy, piano-led affairs. Chronologically first is Steve Gray’s score for Expose, the initial Richmond film (and the one with the “rubber glove murders, blood and gore”) while the films director James Kenelm Clarke took over composer duties for Hardcore (which featured Herbie Flowers on bass guitar) and the final Richmond film Lets Get Laid, whose budget stretched to a 1940s setting, was described by one critic as “not unlike a George Formby movie with tits”, and whose nostalgic soundtrack is mainly represented on the CD by Clarke’s Ivor Novello inspired “You Turn My Legs to Water”.

The CD’s accompanying booklet includes an essay by Clarke on the making of the films and their soundtracks, as well as a piece by Vocalion’s Oliver Lomax which effectively serves as a bio of Clarke and the recently deceased Steve Gray. Both Clarke and Lomax speak highly of Gray, whose haunting soundtrack for Expose was, astonishingly, recorded in just one day at a studio in Denmark Street. While Clarke’s directing career has been reasonably well documented over the years, this is the first time his work as a composer has been written up, and reveals him to have been quite prolific in the library music field, composing for such library music companies as KPM and Amphonic music, and as a result subsequently seeing his work turn up in TV shows as diverse as The Sweeney and On the Buses. Clarke is refreshing candid about his career in his essay, admitting he lost a fortune on his first film “Got It Made” in 1973, and was eager to sail into more commercial waters with the three Fiona Richmond sexploitation films, becoming aware of the genre’s commercial possibilities after directing a documentary on the British sex film industry for the BBC’s Man Alive programme in 1975. “These three films represent” writes Clarke “a certain rather oddball example of the British film production in the 1970s; under-financed, little recognised but doggedly triumphant in terms of their overall success. The music represents, in turn, some of the best studio playing of that period”.

Never before commercially released, the CD has been mastered from the original analogue stereo tapes, and is available directly from Vocalion’s own website

http://www.duttonvocalion.co.uk/proddetail.asp?prod=CDSML8450

Cliff Twemlow - New book

A new book about Cliff Twemlow, the bouncer, actor, library music composer, and horror paperback writer is due out at the end of the year. Since Twemlow already wrote his autobiography in 1980, the new book intends to focus mostly on his subsequent film career in the likes of GBH, The Eye of Satan and Firestar: First Contact. The book's authors have tracked down an extensive collection of very rare films and Twemlow’s friends and family for the book, its looking very impressive.

There is also some interesting Twemlow related memorabilia and info at their website, including newspaper cuttings from around the time of GBH’s video release.
http://www.itsahotun.com/Cliff_Twemlow.htm

Harrison Marks 1973 interview

GHM

inter

viewed by Verve magazine in October 1973, he tends to distance himself from pornography in the interview, yet there are a number of his h/c productions from this period that have since resurfaced so he clearly was making them and his official website mentions that he was filming more explicit material as early as 1967 “for a German businessman”. To put this interview into historical context though, it was hardly socially acceptable to be making blue films back in the 70s, and given Marks had been prosecuted for sending ‘obscene material’ through the post in 1971 and the same year this interview took place he would be kicked out of his studio after the landlord objected to 8mm sex films being made on the premises, it would have been inviting trouble to admit to shooting more explicit material.

Interestingly the magazine’s editorial claims that Marks had recently been approached by a ‘very large company’ (which he wouldn’t name) to shoot material on videotape, a format in its infancy in 73. Its quite funny to hear the magazine’s editor describe video like a hi-tech futuristic device “the system would work like this.. You buy an attachment that fits onto the back of your television, plug in a cassette and wham! Instant films of your choice.”